The Grey

In The Grey, Liam Neeson plays a rifleman at North Slope oil operation. His job: shoot the large, fearsome wolves of Northern Alaska before they attack men out working on the equipment. For reasons that will be explained later in the film, he is deeply depressed and contemplating suicide.

On a charter flight from the North Slope down to Anchorage, his plane goes down. It falls to Neeson to rally the survivors and lead them first to shelter, then to home. This will pose challenge enough, until the wolves show up.  Now Neeson, without his rifle, must fight them for the survival of his pack.

What follows is an exciting, action-packed hour and a half of survivalist, wolf-battlin' action in the Frozen North. Neeson has both the acting and action chops to hold the film together, the set-pieces are both gripping and understandable, and the whole thing works. Will it provoke deep thought and long conversations? No. But it's a pleasant diversion and can make 90 minutes of your flight back in coach whiz right by.

Another Earth

Another Earth is an intimate drama with a science-fiction hook. The drama: a young woman's released from jail after killing a man's family through a drunken driving accident. She tries to make amends. The hook: a parallel Earth, from a sliver of the multiverse very like our own, appears in the sky the night of the accident. It floats there, out in space, the physical manifestation of the fantasies of those who dwell in the world of might-have-been.

The film, co-written by star Brit Marling, works on the level of intimate drama alone. The tragic thing about many DUI arrests and fatalities is that the culprits aren't evil: they're often just regular people who exercised poor judgement on a given night. Marling's just-released convict falls under this category. She's consumed with guilt and depression and wants to make amends. The man, sensitively played by William Mapother, wallows in depression and alcohol and needs someone to help him pull himself together.

At this point, you probably think you know what's going to happen.  You're about half right. The other half is the enigma posed by that new planet in the sky, that other Earth. Is it a world where the accident never happened? Would you go there, if you could? What might you find?

All this is handled delicately, sensitively, and much better than I'd anticipated. The second-act reveal plays much more provocatively than I'd expected, leading my wife and me to enjoy a long conversation exploring whether, if we were in the the man's shoes, we could ever forgive. We concluded that we could not, but I'll leave it for you to discover what he concludes and what that means.

Don't see Another Earth in installments or while doing chores. This a film about mood, and it needs time and space to create a mood in you. If you give it the attention it deserves, I'm confident that you'll find it worth your time.